`salmonet said nothing about individual lives in his post. Facebook disappearing tomorrow wouldn't mean that historians a hundred years from now couldn't get an extremely clear view of what life today is like in aggregate.
Have any old Zip disks laying around (or did you ever)? How accessible are the contents to you today?
Now imagine trying to get that data 150 years from now.
Re:Online Shopping in the 1950s
by steven777400 on Thursday January 14, 2016 @03:33PM
(#10904246)
Even having the drives may not mitigate issues of that kind. A variety of articles [0] describe unexpectedly (well, to consumers at least) short lifespans on CD-Rs. Lots of CD drives are still around, but you might be unpleasently surprised if you put in a 15 year old CD-R that's been sitting on the shelf.
[0] Google search: burned cd lifespan
> Have any old Zip disks laying around (or did you ever)?
Nope. Too young for Zip disks. My data's on redundant hard drives in my NAS and has a cloud backup as the braces to that NAS's belt.
> Now imagine trying to get that data 150 years from now.
I have a remarkable amount of trust and faith in the Internet Archive to continue being excellent at their jobs or others to pick up the slack. This thread reminded me about a project I wanted to bounce off of those folks, too...BRB.
Re:Online Shopping in the 1950s
by greglindahl on Thursday January 14, 2016 @11:00PM
(#10907086)
The way to save bits is to copy them onto new media every few years. That's what the Internet Archive does -- we're currently phasing out 2 terabyte disks for 8's.
I don't think they will. Too much data about our lives is locked up and lost by online communities falling apart. Anyone who invested a significant amount of time in myspace probably has nothing to show for that period of their lives, and I worry that the new trend of lifelong facebook use will make that even worse.